southern cattail

It is found throughout sutropical and tropical regions worldwide. It is sometimes found as a subdominant associate in mangrove ecosystems such as the Petenes mangroves ecoregion of Yucatán. The Southern Cattail grows between 2.0 and 2.5 meters in length and has flat sheaths to protect its core. It thrives in marshes and ecosystems where the land has a similarity to wetlands. It can also survive in high salinity water sources, making it much more resilient than similar species to this kind of cattail.

In the Mesopotamian Marshes of southern Iraq, Khirret is a dessert made from the pollen of this plant. In Turkish folk medicine the female inflorescences of this plant and other Typha are used externally to treat wounds such as burns. Extracts of T. domingensis have been demonstrated to have wound healing properties in rat models. Water extracts of the fruit, female flower and male flower of Typha domingensis exhibit iron chelating activity as well as superoxide and nitric oxide scavenging activities. By contrast, only the fruit and female flower extracts were found to have alpha-glucosidase inhibitory activity. A partially purified, proanthocyanidin-rich butanol fraction of the fruit was shown to be a competitive inhibitor of alpha-glucosidase, which also had concurrent antioxidant activity. Typha domingensis can reduce water contamination by enterobacteria, which are pathogens, by up to 98 percent. It improves the water quality and the Southern Cattail is used in artisanal crafts due to their wide reed sheaths which ease the weaving process. Areas where the cattail and bulrush is harvested in much larger methods, such as the coastal areas of San Jeronimo, Patzcuaro and Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán seem to exhibit larger than average cattail sizes, lengths, and population density. …